The pulse between Washington and Beijing (battle for 5G, trade war, industrial espionage) has been added in recent days one more front: the media. The US State Department will consider Chinese state media correspondents as foreign agents, and not as journalists. So the Xinhua agency, the CGTN television, the China International Radio, the China Daily newspaper, and its distributor, Hai Tian Development USA, will have to give an account of who they hire, who they fire and what properties they own on American soil. Your envoys will be subject to the same scrutiny as the officials of a foreign government. No one can miss that the Chinese state media have a direct line with the Communist Party. But this has happened now, among other things, because in the election campaign Republicans usually try to scratch votes by showing a hard hand with China.
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China expels three journalists from 'The Wall Street Journal' in retaliation for a column of racist headline
A day later, Beijing counterattacked by canceling the visa of three well-known journalists from the Wall Street Journal . That amounts to throwing them out of China, because the residence permit there is attached to the credential of a reporter. It was retaliation for an opinion article published by that newspaper titled China is the real sick person in Asia . This is an offensive term for the Chinese, because that is how their country was described at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, pointing it out as weak, unable to manage, against the European and US colonial powers. Although the column referred to the mismanagement of information about the coronavirus and financial risks, for Beijing, the Chinese media and thousands of Internet users, the newspaper crossed a racist line. China demanded an official apology and that responsibilities be cleared, to which the editor of the WSJ responded that, very sorry, the opinion and information departments are watertight compartments.
The fact is that none of the three punished correspondents had anything to do with the text. Its author is Walter Russell Mead, a conservative academic who likes to provoke. However, he insists that he did not write the headline. On the WSJ website, the discord column was accompanied by the video A communist coronavirus , a jumble linking health epidemic, pollution and Hong Kong protests. Too bad that such a poor piece has been the perfect excuse to throw out three experienced reporters who have uncovered key cybersecurity issues and human rights violations.
The mood now in China is heated: it is a time of great fear for the epidemic, economic uncertainty and political purges within the Party. Expel foreign correspondents is another step in the control of information about the country. At the same time, the West is increasingly worried about containing Chinese influence in governments and businesses. An escalation of mutual distrust that makes predicting more difficult times. @anafuentesf
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